Accessibility in reading systems: what about dyslexia?

It’s now well established that people facing dyslexia can derive many benefits from digital text reading. The ability to adapt text presentation with, for instance, extra-large letters spacing, alternate line colors, or dynamical syntactic coloration, can significantly improve the reading speed of this category of readers.

Epub, the open standard for digital publication, as a major role to play in this field. EDRLAB has started, in conjonction with its work regarding access to reading for visually impaired persons, to explore the impact of the EPUB standard on the reading practices of those with dyslexia.

Publishers specialised in accessible books for dyslexic readers are producing EPUB with specific enhancements. Mobidys, an EDRLab member, is one of the most active and successful in this field.

Some companies are also developing e-readers with features specifically intended to facilitate their use by readers facing dyslexia; the idea, here, being to ease the access to standard EPUB, books for instance, by enabling specific text modifications.

We also see reading solutions offered to dyslexic readers with no EPUB support depriving the users from the extraordinary amount of informations the publications in EPUB format now represent.

In order to discover the extent of these efforts, Luc Maumet, for EDRLab, has started to map the digital solutions already on the market, both readers (in classic form or browser based) and adapted ebooks.

Our goals, by mapping the diversity of these existing solutions, are :

to reach a better understanding of the actors and their work in this specific field in relation with EPUB.

to address their needs by a standardisation of EPUB enhancements for dyslexic people.

the development of reading solutions supporting these enhancements.

potentially, the development of back-office tools for producing such enhanced content.

And, yes, you can contribute ! You may have seen a solution which is not presented on this map (maybe yours…), please help us : a simple mail or twitter message with a link to the related resource and we will add it to the publicly available map.

Any digital resource, addressing the needs of those with dyslexia, whether or not it’s supporting/using EPUB, is of interest to us here.